Gettysburg

I’ve been writing about my recent six-hour tour of the Gettysburg National Military Park with Jeff Davis, who moved to Gettysburg after retirement specifically so he could study and help preserve the battlefield.

I ran a column Saturday about our trip, and Monday I wrote a blog entry about a monument to Sallie, a regimental dog whose devotion is one of many moving stories of those awful three days in July 1863. Still, I’ve barely scratched the surface, as you might imagine.

You’ll have to forgive my enthusiasm on this subject. Davis, who accepts no compensation for his occasional tours, does them only for family, friends and the occasional tourist he finds wandering aimlessly. I was really lucky.

If I converted this experience into a series of columns, I could write about some of the heroes he introduced me to over the course of our tour. Union Lt. Col. Rufus Dawes, hero of the battle at the Railroad Cut. Union Gen. George Sears Greene, who brilliantly defended Culp’s Hill against a much larger Confederate force. John Burns, the 70-year-old War of 1812 veteran and Gettysburg resident who picked up his ancient musket and went out to join the Union army on the first day, fighting side-by-side with the Iron Brigade before being wounded.

Or about some of the cool stuff that remains unchanged, 143 years later, such as the old barn with a cannonball hole in it, the terrain that determined how the battle was fought, and the markers the battle’s veterans put down afterward to designate their positions.

Or the drunks, dopes and scoundrels on both sides whose terrible decisions put their men and their armies at risk, such as Union Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles — “every inch a crook,” Davis said — and the political connections that put and kept them in command.

Or Davis’ experiences as a member of Park Watch, the group of more than 100 volunteers that has had a dramatic impact on vandalism and other crime in the park. Davis told me one particularly interesting story about a hair-raising nighttime search through the woods for a group of well-organized thieves near the Devil’s Den area of the park, as well as about an idiot who climbed an apple tree in a well-traveled part of the park to shake fruit loose for his kids. “There are always knuckleheads out there,” he said.

Or about Davis himself and his fascination with the details of the fighting, such as his research into the real location of the scene depicted in the famous battlefield-casualty photo, “A Harvest of Death.”

I could go on and on, but you’re better off reading books and articles by people who really know what they’re talking about. Better yet, go see Gettysburg yourself, particularly if you’ve never been there.

You probably won’t get a six-hour tour. But in your own way, you’ll be helping to fulfill the promise Abraham Lincoln made as he redefined — in some of the most eloquent words ever spoken — the stakes in this bloody battle and this horrible war.

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” he said, “but it can never forget what they did here.”